Brewing Discord

The hills are burning along highway 14. Columns of smoke dot the rolling horizon, and charred tree stumps smolder on the slopes. It may look like a vision of destruction, but Nguyen Van Quyen sees riches rising from the ashes. He’s looking not at the felled trees, but at the rows of green bushes next to them. For every fire in Dak Lak province, there is more land to grow coffee and cotton. And Quyen has a hectare to plant. For a young man of 24, with a wife and new baby, it’s a dream come true. “We had no money and no land back home,” he says. “Here we have a chance.”

For pioneers like Quyen, Vietnam’s vast central highlands are a land of opportunity. Facing a desperate shortage of farmland, nearly 1 million ethnic Vietnamese, or Kinh, have headed for the hills in the past decade, spurred on by a government that saw the area, populated primarily by minority hill tribes, as a safety valve for impoverished and landless lowlanders. Nestled next to the Cambodian border, the remote, rugged hills are Vietnam’s version of America’s Wild West. Along Highway 14 signs of the frontier are everywhere: clapboard houses hastily built, tin-roofed general stores offering basic goods and people busily clearing land, building and working the fields.

The highlands even has a bit of the rough-and-tumble of America’s Westfar more, in fact, than Vietnam’s officials would like. In February, thousands of ethnic minorities rampaged through towns in Dak Lak and Gia Lai provinces, apparently enraged by the still-unexplained arrests of two Jarai tribesmen near the Cambodian border. They threw stones, broke windows and in one village reportedly tied up and beat a local official. Witnesses say some shouted for the Kinh to leave. In a country where open opposition is rare and dealt with harshly, the riots amounted to Vietnam’s worst unrest since 1997 when thousands of villagers in northeastern Thai Binh province protested against land distribution by corrupt officials.

This latest unrest came at an especially bad time for the Communist Party, as it prepares for its twice-a-decade general congress. Already anxious about maintaining their grip on power, officials sent in army troops who crushed the revolt and quickly sealed off the highlands. At least 30 protesters were arrested. When foreign media were allowed in briefly last week, they were closely followed by a white van filled with local police. Officials blocked reporters’ access to protest participants and downplayed the troubles, blaming it on Vietnamese exiles bent on toppling the Hanoi regime. “The extremists tried to trick the people, but their scheme did not work,” says Nguyen Van Lanh, deputy chairman of the Dak Lak People’s Committee. “Now, everything is back to normal.”

Maybe so. But this was not the first sign that all is not quiet on the western frontier. In August smaller groups of minority protesters burned two hectares of coffee plantations and clashed with police and Vietnamese settlers. As with the February uprising, the underlying issues appear to be land encroachment and increasing resentment of the Kinh majority among members of the region’s 38 hill tribes. Collectively known as Montagnards by the former French colonialists, the hill people are famous for their colorful dress and dance, ruou or rice wine ceremoniesand their recruitment by U.S. special forces during the Vietnam War. But the unrest goes beyond minority rights and transmigration problems. The central highlands’ troubles are a microcosm of all the contentious issues facing Vietnamland disputes, corruption, a shaky economy and accusations of religious repression.

Perhaps the key to the tension lies in the lush coffee plantations that cover more than 200,000 hectares in Dak Lak. Vietnam has become the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee (behind Brazil) in the past decade, and last year it was the No. 1 exporter of the robusta bean. But there’s a bleaker story behind the impressive statistics. After the war years, the communist government embarked on a major resettlement campaign: it banned collective land ownership, declared traditional tribal lands state property available for redistribution and forbade nomadic slash-and-burn farming practices, forcing hill tribes to settle down. Complaints of corruption in doling out the land have been rife here as elsewhere in the country. In the 1990s coffee helped fuel a 12% average growth rate in Dak Lak, encouraging more settlers to flock to the region. Almost all were members of the Kinh majority, which makes up 90% of Vietnam’s population. Dak Lak’s population has nearly doubled in 10 years, to 1.9 million. In 1975, ethnic minorities made up half of Dak Lak’s population. Now, they number only 25%. Some officials, such as Gia Lai’s Governor Nguyen Ly Ha, say it’s natural to have tensions with such movements of people. But he says the government has no choice but to continue the policy: “The Kinh need land.”

For years, the highlands absorbed the newcomers and they lived in relative peace. What may have helped trigger the recent animosity is the sudden bust that has followed the coffee boom, hurting almost everyone in the area. In the past year, world coffee prices have plummeted. Farmers who in 1999 could get $1.40 per kilo now earn only 40 cents. That doesn’t cover production costs. Y Dien, born into the Ede tribe 40 years ago, lives in Ea Brieng, a dusty Dak Lak village. In the hope of finding a better future, he followed government orders to abandon communal living 10 years ago and began growing coffee. Within a few years he was able to buy a television and Vietnam’s ultimate status symbola Honda motorbike. But these days his extended family of 14 is struggling. Still, he doesn’t blame the Kinh settlers to whom he sells his crop and even credits them with bringing development to the region. “Without the Kinh,” he says, “we could do nothing at all.”

Other minority members are less generous. The hill tribes have a long history of resistance to rule from the lowlandswhether French colonists, the former South Vietnam government or, most recently, the communists. A remnant band of allegedly U.S.-trained ethnic minority rebels known by the French acronym fulro staged raids from across the Cambodian border until the early ’90s when they migrated to the United States. Vietnamese authorities are accusing one of the former guerrillas of engineering last month’s unrest. Officials in Gia Lai seized documents they say are proof that “reactionary forces” were behind the protests. Signed by Ksor Kok, founder of the Montagnard Foundation in South Carolina, the papers call for a general uprising and an autonomous highlands state, to be named Degar. “The Kinh people will kill us all by any means they can because they want our land,” the document reads. Ksor Kok has said in interviews that he does not advocate violence, though his website has outlined plans for independence. He accuses Vietnamese officials of forcibly sterilizing minorities and of religious persecution. International groups like Freedom House have also documented a crackdown on banned evangelical Christian “house churches” that claim many minority converts.

Officials reject the accusations. Most deny there are any problems in the provinces at all. No official would say why the two Jarai tribesmen were arrested (both have been released after signing self-criticisms). They say demonstrators were promised money to come to the protests and left peacefully when they received none. Gia Lai’s Governor Ha, one of the few who acknowledges that transmigration has caused tensions, says the government has compensated the minorities by giving them free education and health care. “Just as in a family, the children may be jealous of each other,” Ha says. “It’s our job as ‘parents’ to make peace between them.”

For now, official control in the highlands remains tight, while most people, like Nguyen Van Quyen, merely want to get on with their lives. When he and his wife, Linh, moved to their one-room wooden shack a year ago, just days after they married, they were escaping dismal prospects back home in Ha Tinh province. Here in Dak Lak, he’s eager to begin cultivating his leased hectare. “It’s hard going, yes, but I knew it would be. I want a good life for my family,” he says, pointing to his four-month-old son: a frontier baby who faces the volatile complexities of a changing Vietnam.